Cricket Media's Fine Balance

A tense moment at the breakfast buffet, a last dance with Matthew Hayden and the stories that don’t get told

“When I’m at my lowest and someone is kicking me, I look up and it is always you,” Michael Clarke said during one of the bigger blow ups I’ve ever had with a player. A player who, in this case, was one of the best batters of his era and also the Australian captain.

It is fair to say we were at loggerheads that particular day and things had come to a head. He was furious and I was not backing down. It is also fair to say that we were never close, but I rated Clarke as a cricketer and had not, despite his allegation, been one of the pack who’d ridden him hard over issues of character. There is much I admired about him.

I told him that. Suggesting that if he lay out every positive article I’d ever written about him they would stretch from my home in the Inner West to his in Bondi. The one I’d written was pretty incendiary, but it was right.

From memory he admitted that, on reflection, that bit about the positive articles was probably true. I knew he didn’t rate me over a few things and respected that. Later, to my great shame, I really screwed up breaking the story (the excellent Ben Horne and I broke it at the same time after hearing it from different sources) the day he resigned, but I apologised profusely. He seemed to forgive me, but I reckon Shane Warne held it against me for years. In person Michael was always polite, usually friendly and somebody I found hard to dislike. There was, however, a consistent buzz about matters I did not witness.

Players and administrators often don’t realise how much gets alleged but goes unreported. Usually because it is tawdry, or trivial and more trouble than it is worth.

Balancing relationships with players is one of the most difficult things a cricket writer has to do.

You can do the job without any.

Many, if not most, do. They stand back and work from a distance, but if you want to be a news breaker and want to attempt to understand character better you get closer. And who would not want to get inside the heads of such extraordinarily talented people; especially when they are the subject of your daily musing?

The fearless among us go hard, consequences be damned. The more cautious found a balance. The gutless pretended they didn’t know. Sorry to say I was probably more toward the middle/latter end of this spectrum.

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If it could be helped I would not write anything about families and as little as possible about anything that didn’t directly effect the sport. If something came up about a player having an affair (something - you will probably not believe this - I have to say I rarely came across) or some tawdry scandal I would set land speed records as I set off in the opposite direction.

I remember priding myself on not ever having written the name of Clarke’s then fiancé even though the social pages were obsessed with her. I never wanted to be that sort of journalist. I remember stalling my departure for a tour of New Zealand as a story played out about troubles in their relationship that caused him to briefly go home.

I also remember being a little disappointed that he brought it up in the first press conference I attended on arriving for the series. There was no avoiding it after that, but I gave it a once over and moved on to matters at hand.

Clarke scored 168 in the first innings of the Test and won the player of the match award. He also threw the (cheap) medal in the bin. A staffer fished it out and gave it to me to give to my son.

You have to pick your fights in a sport that exists in such a confined space.

I probably shouldn’t tell this story, but I remember a photographer who worked for a different paper getting a call from the tabloids who wanted to her to pap a picture of the fiance who was staying at the same hotel as us. They were going to do some hatchet job or other. The office was told they had not seen her and didn’t know where she was. She was at the breakfast bar 10 metres from the table when the call was made.

Was it wrong? In the eyes of the office it would definitely have been considered a crime, but the situation was a good example of the delicate balance involved in being on the road and staying in the same hotel as the teams.

There has to be some respect for private space even when it is a public space. If you know what I mean. One new player manager wanted journos banned from team hotels. It would have set up an interesting dynamic. Overseas tours and the hotel was (few organisations can afford to put their people in the same hotels as the cricketers these days) the place where you got to know the players. Where you could both let your guard down, have a drink or hang out by the pool. It was a place you developed their trust.

And got stories.

Once I was in a cold hotel pool after an exercise session when a player got in to do the same. Normally I would run, embarrassed by my stick insect physique, this time I stayed because I knew that something as brewing and I wanted to get more of a sense of it. I reckon I had hypothermia (thanks to Tony Taylor below for pointing out that hyperthermia was not the right word here) by the time the player acknowledged that there was truth to what I was hearing.

A few Tests later homeworkgate happened. I was shocked but not blindsided. It was part of a bigger picture confirmed in the swimming pool.

The night the players got suspended I remember filing my last yarn and debriefing at the bar with coach and team manager, putting away little nuggets of information. I became somewhat alarmed by what I was hearing from these two but I at least understood where they were coming from.

(Thank god they never followed through with the idea of producing a handbook on team principles for new members of the Test side. Maybe that was the drink talking.)

It is always important to clear the air with someone you have taken to task and critical when touring with them. Breakfasts were an agony some days. You could literally look up from your cereal and see a player reading the story where you go on at great length about how woeful their form is, how grim their future and how much better their potential replacement, at a nearby table.

To make matters worse, they would often be surrounded by team mates who’d console them by mouthing ugly things about the person who had typed this tripe.

Coaches and team mates always back the struggling publicly (but quietly they are thinking exactly what you are).

In such circumstances it is critical to front the person and give them their right of replay face to face. Waiting for the toast. With people lining up either side of you. Team mates hissing from the table. “Did you think what I wrote was unfair?” Rarely do they aim up.

Everything is about relationships for a beat reporter. As I said, you can survive by only ever talking to a player in press conferences (or ripping the quotes off someone who has), you can even thrive if you have a brilliant turn of phrase and a keen eye for an eye catching angle, but if you can be the person that people take aside when things are brewing, or a moment is at hand, then you have a significant advantage.

Can you be too close?

Absolutely. I examine my conscience on this often and recognise times when I’ve pulled my punch. Me and Dave Warner get on very well. Gideon, rather impolitely, calls me the other half of his brain. It’s a relationship that has given media managers and staff nervous sores and one that causes people to roll their eyes, but in my defence I will point out I was the idiot who went on television and said his Test career was over (only for him to score a double century in the next match).

I sided completely with the players during the MOU dispute, but that is because I thought they were in the right and the administration was in the wrong. It didn’t help that the administration had made a monumental blunder by taking a vow of silence. Maybe because they knew they were in the wrong. It was an ugly time and complaints were made to The Australian by Cricket Australia about my reporting, but I was confident I was right and the stories I wrote were also. I also had the experience of covering a Rio Tinto industrial dispute in an earlier life and recognised a similar template of tactics from the former alumni of that mining outfit who were now on the payroll at Cricket Australia.

It must be great to cover a sport like, say, the AFL. There are so many teams, so many players, coaches, administrators. You can set fire to three quarters of the league and still have people who’ll drink with you, give you a snippet here or there. Cricket is a much smaller boat.

Relationships are everything.

The story about Usman Khawaja’s human rights protest on his shoes ran exclusively on the front page of The Australian because we had got to know each other over the years and so he had come over just to say hello at training. I spotted the shoes, asked him about them, told him I’d have to write something and warned him it was going to cause a big stink. He said he didn’t mind (but scampered off when I tried to photograph them with my phone; the photo of the shoes that ran everywhere was taken the day before and nobody had looked closely enough to see the message).

That can’t happen if you aren’t at training and haven’t made an effort to get to know the players. Khawaja was always wary of the press and remains so, but he’d relaxed somewhat. Players tend to do that as they get older.

The story about Steve Smith being keen to open broke because somebody close to him approached me on the field one morning and said he was keen. To that point nobody had seriously considered it.

It might not be the best idea in the world, but it was a good story and that’s all I cared about.

When Alex Carey appeared affected by the scandal surrounding his actions at Lord’s I knew something of him and his character from a time in a Perth pub the summer or two previous. Covid had lifted, the side had just won in Perth and had retired to the pub next to the stadium for a beer. It was great to see them out in public and it probably said something about how confined they had been that they chose a place so full of cricket fans.

Carey was drinking with Mitchell Starc and Travis Head, among others. They called me over, I said I had a rule against drinking with players (not really), but hung around and was alarmed to have Alex ask me why the side was so disliked. It wasn’t, I attempted to explain. Much of the noise came from empty headed culture war warriors whose volume and relentlessness bore no relationship to this numbers.

Most Australians love their cricket team, I said, but I was interested that Carey would even care. It said something about his character and went some way to explaining why Lord’s had such an impact on him. He cares too much.

The relationship can become too comfortable. I’ve half jokingly told players that while it all might be good fun now I may have to do them over some day. Sometimes it happens. To give them their due, when you do go hard they mostly shrug and acknowledge you have a job to do. Most of them get it.

Being the first to turn on a player over form has never been my go. I’m soft on that topic, I’ve got too much respect for the latent talent of people and my left liberal values make me prone to give people another chance. Sometimes it is a fault.

I thought the great Malcolm Conn went too hard at times, but he was fearless, uncompromising and unapologetic. He also had the respect of most players because of that.

I note that the Ponting camp bristled at how critical Big Mal was in the last years of Punter’s career, but when it was all over Ricky admitted that Mal was probably right.

Sometimes its handy to have the media to blame because the alternative would be to acknowledge that the fault is yours (your lack of runs or wickets). I often say that we perform a public service on this front.

Trust is critical.

Somehow me and Matthew Hayden hit it off from the moment we met, but I hadn’t had a lot to do with him at that time. Nonetheless, when Hayden did a trip out to the commission areas of Melbourne as part of a Christmas drive for a charity he was tied in with, he invited me and my daughter to come along. Grace was very young then and was with him so my Lucy tagged along too.

It was an interesting day. I remember Matty dancing with a toothless woman on the worn carpet of her shabby home, his baggy green planted on her head, her smile lighting the dim front room. We did a lot of driving that day and connected further.

When his career really started to hit the rocks he allowed me in, spoke to me about what was going on and it was a privilege to be up close in such a time. He didn’t spill his guts, he was still in denial, but it was amazing to be close to someone so apparently indomitable at a time when they were so vulnerable.

It was telling that at the worst moment of their lives the players involved in the sandpaper scandal allowed the travelling Australian press pack to sit in their breakfast room/foyer and report away while the hordes who had flown in were confined to the footpath outside. Steve Smith showed his character by crossing the floor to talk to us after learning his fate. You could see how awfully raw it was for him and while we had reported unflinchingly on the mistakes that had been made we were not without sympathy.

When it came time to write further we were able to take readers into the space. Give them a glimpse of what it looked and felt like. Cameron Bancroft was shadow batting in a corner, distracted and almost disassociated.

Touring journalists bring so much more to the table than the poor “content providers” who are stuck in a room ripping things off social media, endlessly recycling, tirelessly filling the void with shit someone said on the telly or Twitter. It is a credit to newspapers that they still keep sending people around as it is a very costly exercise. The Australian was great to both Gideon and I on that front and the major publications still have someone on the road. Long gone, however, are the days when there would be five of us from the same paper harvesting every angle, draining every ounce from the day.

Beware the bottom feeders who do not have people on the road, beware the sensationalists screaming constantly _ often about matters so trivial they’re barely worth acknowledging. The controversial Col Allan, recently of the New York Post and alarmingly said to be a sounding board for Donald Trump, said to me once that “if you’ve got a good story you don’t need to shout about it”. A good story does its own shouting.

It was good advice.

And so, as we slouch slowly toward the Border-Gavaskar, beware the cricket writer who has no cricket to write on. They’re prone to indulgence.

PS: Subscriptions to Cricket Et Al will help Gideon and I keep the show on the road this summer. Sam Buckingham-Jones has written a small piece about our (ad)venture here.